Which females do male lizards find to be the sexiest? Tracy Langkilde, associate professor of biology at Penn State, and Lindsey Swierk, graduate student in Langkilde's lab, tackle this question by examining the mating behavior and blue-color patterns of fence lizards in Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi. They published their findings, which offer a snapshot into the evolution of male-female differences, in the early online edition of The Royal Society journal Biology Letters on Nov. 6.

The Marker Lectures in Evolutionary Biology planned for today and Tuesday have been canceled. Jonathan Losos, the Monique and Philip Lehner Professor for the Study of Latin America and a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University, was to give the free public lectures, sponsored by the Penn State Eberly College of Science.

Studying parasites is something that Anne M. Vardo-Zalik loves. Vardo-Zalik, an assistant professor of biology at Penn State York, spent the summer in California collecting samples relevant to the study of the western fence lizard and conducting research on how the malaria parasite impacts the species. She prefers to work with natural parasite-host systems and for the past 10 years has monitored the lizards and tried to determine how parasites and their hosts (the lizards) survive over time.

For a portion of the summer, Vardo-Zalik was assisted by Victoria Motz, a senior at Penn State York studying life science. Motz worked side-by-side with Vardo-Zalik.

It has long been known that snakes are descendants of lizards, but whether snakes lost their legs while living in the sea or on land has been a matter of great debate among evolutionary biologists. Only one group of marine lizards, the mosasaurs, lived during the Cretaceous period when snakes first appear in the fossil record. These extinct relatives of the Komodo dragon have a skeleton that is much like a snake's (albeit 30 feet long), provoking some researchers to speculate that the snake family descended from mosasaurs.

It has long been known that snakes are descendants of lizards, but whether snakes lost their legs while living in the sea or on land has been a matter of great debate among evolutionary biologists. Only one group of marine lizards, the mosasaurs, lived during the Cretaceous period when snakes first appear in the fossil record. These extinct relatives of the Komodo dragon have a skeleton that is much like a snake's (albeit 30 feet long), provoking some researchers to speculate that the snake family descended from mosasaurs.